[Eug-lug] Need some pointers on setting up my Ubuntu Box with a RAID 0

[Garl Grigsby]

Quentin Hartman wrote:
> On Nov 15, 2007 9:29 AM, Ben Barrett <stircrazyben at gmail.com 
> <mailto:stircrazyben at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto ("Fake" raid is
>     soft raid, nothing really fake about it)
>     I don't know why software RAID does not get more respect these
>     days.  When processors were just babies,
>     hardware raid was needed for reasonable performance, but now soft
>     raid is really fast, unless you're comparing
>     it with enterprise-grade NAS setups.  IMO soft raid is fine for
>     non-SCSI RAIDs :)
>
>
> Just a clarification on this point. Fakeraid is (every time I've seen 
> it, anyway..) used to refer to raid cards that claim to have RAID, but 
> actually offload all the raid functionality to the host machine via a 
> driver. Most of these cards only have a firmware program to manage the 
> drives, nothing else is done in hardware. Hence the name Fakeraid, it 
> looks like hardware raid, but it's not, it's fake. This is also 
> sometimes called firmware raid. A very small percentage (I only know 
> of one) of these cards also have a hardware XOR engine for offloading 
> the work required for Raid 5. Ooohhh... Fakeraid+ :)
>
> My rule of thumb is to use true hardware when it's available, and to 
> require it in "important" servers. Failing that, I use software raid. 
> You get 80-90% of the performance of hardware raid in most use cases, 
> and management is consistent from machine to machine. The 
> "middleground" Fakeraid gets you none of the performance advantages of 
> true hardware raid since everything is offloaded to the host anyway, 
> and introduces a whole bunch of vendor-specific complications, so I 
> avoid it entirely.
I'll throw in a 'yup, me too'. Fakeraid is a tremendous headache waiting 
to happen. Either go true hardware raid (if you've got the budget AND 
you can afford to have a spare card on hand) or go software raid.

garl